April 22/06 10:09 am - Canadians in Europe

There is a team Canada development project taking place in France. Last weekend saw the team compete in 4 races in 3 days.

Report by Brad Fairall, Team Symmetrics, results below.

Marsh Cooper and I had a big weekend over the Easter break with 4 races in 3 days - with La Circuit de Mene having a TT and a road race on the same day. We were back on the coast of France for the first race of the weekend, La Gainesbarre, an Elite 2 race that featured a few good teams including Vendee U. The race is named after a French musician who was kind of like the Frank Sinatra of France, donating a large sum of money to his hometowns cycling team shortly before they were going to have to shut the race down. There is not much to say about this rain other than that it was 5 degrees and raining sideways along the beach with tons of sand and dirt on the roads. Marsh and I were told to take it easy and save ourselves for the next 2 days which were much more important to the team. I pulled out early and Marsh just rolled around in the bunch but the team continued to rack up the results with Phil Abbott collecting a 3rd place finish and top espoir.

The second race of the weekend was a Maillot des Jeunes, which is the same series of races as the one that I won earlier in the project. The weather had warmed up and the rain had stopped for the race so I was quite a bit happier about things. Midway into the race Marsh crashed again for the second time in 3 races and had to stop because there was not much of a caravan to help him get back in. After the crash it was just Phil and me left in the race, it was also around this time that Jacky came over the radio and told us that the break would go that lap. Following his advise I followed the next move and ended up in a 20-man break which ended up being the move of the day, Jacky is pretty amazing at calling that kind of stuff as its not the first time following his calls has worked for me. From there I was able to get away with two others and I won the sprint, my second win of the season.

On Monday it was an early wake-up call to get ready for the morning TT. The Circuit de Mene is quite a big U23 race with both Thomas Voeckler and Frank Schleck finishing third in recent years. I, for one, am hoping that this trend continues after I took third place in the 6km TT, Marsh finished a solid 14th, not too bad considering neither of us had any aero wheels. I was even happier with my result after I found out that the fourth place finisher, Peter Latham, won the bronze medal in the TT at last year's U23 world Championships. The afternoon road race was hard, really hard and Marsh was a one man wrecking crew, he was attacking constantly and even countering his own moves. This was awesome because it put a ton of pressure on the World Cycling Center (WCC) team who had the lead. The race finished with two really difficult 5km laps with the line at the top of a tough little climb.

This is where Marsh and I really went for the win, eventually getting both of us in a group of four on the last lap and blowing the WCC team to bits leaving the race leader on the front to chase us down. We were riding so hard in the move Marsh said after the race that he though he might pass out.

In the end I blew to bits with 300m to go and crossed the line with the yellow jersey, for some reason the race gave us both a time gap and I lost my third place by a few seconds but we were still happy because we were giving everything for the win and it was us that made the race in the end.

We have just one more race left in France - it was supposed to be the U23 Tour of Flanders but because of a clerical error by the CCA we missed the registration deadline so we will instead be doing Paris- Mantes - another U23 UCI race which BC's Ryder Hesjedal won a few years ago by a 4 min solo.